LTE starts to matter in Germany, rest of Europe

HTC showed us its new HTC One Max and a few accessories for the rest of the One series recently. We also spent some time talking about the significance of LTE in European markets. We quickly learned that as of the second part of this year, most German carriers want to have the LTE specification for the higher end of the market. UK isn’t far behind, as multiple carriers are joining EE and offering LTE.

This becomes a requirement for mainstream and high-end phones and this is why the whole One generation has LTE support that should work in most EU markets. Most countries including Austria still haven’t finished the frequency auctions for LTE and EU and rest of the Europe uses a few frequencies.

Have in mind that European Union has 28 countries with 28 laws and telecom regulators and the whole European continent has total of 50 different countries with 50 different legislative frameworks. Since European network providers have learned that there is money that you can make on the whole LTE hype, they demand LTE support on most of their phones that they offer on two-year contracts.

In the US already this happened roughly a year earlier. Even in 2012 it would have been a big handicap if your phone would not have a LTE support and the Nexus 4 is probably the last significant high-end phone that shipped without LTE in late 2012 and early 2013. The Nexus 5 and just about any significant phone to launch now or in the new future will simply have to have LTE.

The days of 3G only phones are gone; welcome 4G LTE to at least some of the 28 countries of the European Union. The sheer number of markets to deal with means that it won't be easy, but we will eventually get there soon.